LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER

Obama defends NSA spying as 'transparent'

(BUZZFEED) —Barack Obama: Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice.

That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn’t the case … .

And so that’s a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, “Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.” To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.